Who: James, Mike, Caroline, Katie
When: Saturday 6/23/12

We played a game of micro-microscope (picoscope?) spanning the relationship between Jack and Diane. It started with their courtship and ended with Diane's heartbreaking death.

Jack and Diane were from a small town and got hitched right in time to have their first kid. Kid later is faced with the same option (rush into wedlock, keep kid) but chooses a different way. Diane eventually dies of cancer, and the sweet religious Jack loses his faith. Jack and son, after spending a life-time of misunderstanding, connect through Diane's death.

It was really fun being able to draw parallels between Jack/Diane and their daughter, and to highlight the different choices people make given the same circumstances.

That being said, mundane short-focus microscope was kind of predictable. Heart-wrenching, but we saw everything coming. Ultimately, it was a great vehicle for us to play a series of short and intimate scenes.

Thanks everyone for the swell game! What did you think of Picoscope?

I'm a big fan of "picoscope", or as I've called it micro-microscope.

What were the focus? What where the allowed excluded parameters?

I'm not sure if I remember all the specifics... I know the palette had "Distance" (as in the effects on the family), and "Religion" in the Yes, and "Supernatural" in the no. There were frequent jokes about introducing Aliens and SciFi to circumvent the No Supernatural, but it never actually happened.

The first focus was "Premarital Sex", Uh... I forget the second ("growing up"? Maybe?). The third was "Laying down your burdens" and the fourth was "Forgiveness".

Caroline has the cards and could probably answer better than I could. Just figured I'd toss the answer out there.

There were some interesting things, but I agree with Caroline that there were few surprises. There were some interesting moments/side conversations (Can a 19-year-old be a "cougar" if she's going for 15/16-year-old boys), and I think towards the end we were starting to put some twists in... I think the game could have been well served by having more time (twice around the table instead of once).

You guys just like coming up with new -scope prefixes. Telescope! Kaleidoscope! Bathyscope! Oscilloscope! Is that going to happen with Kingdom? Blogdom! Fishdom! Peoplescollectivedom! Man, I hope not.

If you think of your history as two axes, width of focus & length of time, reducing the focus of your history seed can actually be a lot more limiting than reducing time. If you play World War II and the time is only a few years but the scale is the whole world and everyone involved, you still have lots of room to move around. But if you play one person's life, even though you have forty years you have less room to move around. You're stuck with this character and you have to make sure nothing happens that derails what you already know about them.

You can still surprise yourself. We've played lots of Microscope games where a person became the focus and we learned shocking things about them as we jumped back in forth. Pretty much every game actually. Of course if all the players mentally embrace an "ordinary" life, you're going to get an ordinary life.

I knew we should have added Sci-Fi ghosts.